Choosing pictures can be a hairy business

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Jenny Roberts, from St Albans, writes: “This is the second time in a week that The
Times has published a picture of an enormous spider.”

Mrs Roberts suffers from arachnophobia which, as she points out, “is one of
the most common phobias, so publishing these pictures will cause acute
distress to many of your readers.”

Non-arachnophobe readers, she continues, don’t need an illustration to tell
them what a spider looks like, and anyway, “the pictures are invariably of
huge hairy spiders, rather than the normal-size specimens more often
encountered in this